Elsinore Reviews
The end result is effective; Elsinore is like a beautiful little onion, and peeling away the layers over the course of a playthrough is sheer pleasure.
Elsinore is simple and focused, aimed squarely at avid readers who want to manipulate Hamlet with their own hands. It succeeds at this, building a wonderfully meta-textual world that's fascinating to unravel and earns a good few gasps, laughs, and tearful moments, but the long waiting periods and frustration between different events overlapping can grate on after a while. Elsinore is time-looping <em>Hamlet</em>, and that premise is what will likely hook you or not.
Elsinore can be dry sometimes, particularly when you’re hunting for the next significant step forward. There are moments when you’ll feel Bill Murray’s frustration at reliving Groundhog Day again and again, and repeatedly bumping into Elsinore’s Ned Ryerson analogue (which stops being funny after the tenth encounter). But there’s a lot of joy to be had uncovering Elisnore’s emotionally-loaded secrets and, providing you don’t push it too far, playing characters off against each other. Just don’t expect everyone to get a happy ending.